CHAPTER XII. MRS. WOOdbridge ON WOMAN SUFFRAGE. We have given hostages, not to fortune but to humanity. We are building better than we know. We stand not only for the cause of temperance, but for the diviner womanhood that shall ere long bring in the era of "sweeter manners, purer laws." We stand for the mighty forces that level up, not down, and which shall draw manhood up to woman's standard of purity in the personal conduct of life. We are the prophets of a time when the present fashionable frivolities of women and moneyworship of men shall find themselves confronted by God's higher law of a complete humanity resulting from: “Two heads in counsel; two beside the hearth; Two in the noisy business of the world. Two in the liberal offices of life; Two plummets dropped To sound the abyss of science and the secrets of the mind.” For the world begins to see that "No lasting links to bind two souls are wrought, Where passion takes no deeper cast from thought." In all this wondrous battle let our motto be, "Womanliness first; afterward what you will." Let us follow with unchanged devotion the gleaming cross of Him "Who is holiest among the mighty, and mightiest among the holy," even that loving Christ whose gospel raises woman up, and with her lifts toward heaven the world! THIS "The combat deepens; on, ye braves! -Frances E. Willard. HIS is a subject on which Mrs. Woodbridge for years never dreamed of publicly expressing an opinion. Her whole nature instinctively shrank from it. Before she ever thought of leaving the privacy of domestic life she had read in a thousand papers and books thrusts at the unwomanliness of the advocates of female suffrage. Whether these criticisms were ever deserved or not made no differ ence whatever. Her dignified, queenly soul felt an abhorrence of anything that had the taint of unwomanliness. It is safe to say that no human being ever sat in an audience that Mrs. Woodbridge addressed without being profoundly impressed with her charming and gracious presence, and saying inwardly, "Behold a royal woman!" No doubt the fact above mentioned deterred her for years, as it does thousands of other women, from a critical study of the subject. Mrs. Woodbridge often discussed the theme in a casual way with the writer. Neither of us had then reached a conclusion. The leaven was at work; but the dread of being other than God would have her be"pure womanly"-hung like a ghostly shadow over the subject and frightened her away. But the womanly heart, touched with a Christ-like pity for a sin-cursed humanity in a country where the ballot is the expression of wish and will, character and prayer, the final registry of influence and sovereign power, could not always be frightened by a ghost. The exigencies of moral reforms forced her to think long, consecutively, logically, on her knees as usual-think until she reached a conclusion. There is a photograph of a group of five persons belonging to Mrs. Woodbridge, lying here on her table before me, which mutely but eloquently tells the conclusion to which she came. In the upper lefthand corner is the picture of an idiot; in the upper righthand corner a prisoner in stripes; in the lower lefthand corner an Indian bravely decked in paint and feathers, with a necklace of bear's claws; in the righthand corner, a lunatic with wild eye and disheveled hair, clutching a stick and waving a battered hat in fantastic defiance of an imaginary something; and in the center, Mrs. Woodbridge's honored friend, "the uncrowned queen of America"- Frances E. Willard! Underneath the picture is written the interpretation, "American Woman and her Political Peers." In other words, the most cultured women of our land are exactly equal, in the eye of the law that regulates American suffrage, to idiots, prisoners, Indians and lunatics. The immortal author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" can not vote, while the black, ignorant freedman who grooms her horse, can. The woman who owns squares of property in the heart of Chicago, covered with granite structures, ten stories high, and has millions of taxable property, can not vote, while the male street-scavenger or rag-picker can. The woman who wears the title of LL.D. after her name, and would be a fit associate of Plato or Aristotle, can not vote, while a male biped, who scarcely knows enough to go in when it rains, is honored with the ballot. The woman whose ancestry for six or eight generations have been making the best history of this country and fathering educational laws in legislative halls, whose shoulders supported a Websterian brain, and whose saintly life would have made her a beloved of the apostle Paul, could not vote; while foreigners of a few months' residence who cannot read a ballot, and who have formed their characters in the slums and jails and almshouses of Europe, are dignified with the rights of citizenship, and permitted to guide the destinies of the nation! It is this insult to womanhood, this mockery of reason, this outrage upon justice and travesty of Republican institutions, that sooner or later shocks the thoughtful woman, and opens her eyes to the wisdom, propriety and necessity of woman suffrage. American womanhood is not always going to be frightened by a spook of man's invention. There lie before me two letters written to Mrs. Woodbridge in the autumn of 1887 by one in authority, asking her to address the coming meeting of the National Committee of the Prohibition Party on "Woman Suffrage, its Relation to the Prohibition Party." Mrs. Woodbridge answered the first letter, modestly pleading unfamiliarity with the subject which she had never discussed, and suggesting other women who had made the theme a specialty. The answer came back : "The topic is the most difficult before the conference. We can not afford to have the question treated by any other than one whose recognized position commands a hearing. We carefully went over the list and after mature deliberation fixed on you to open the discussion. You may select your own way to open it." She finally consented and delivered the following address in Chicago, December 1, 1887. WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND PROHIBITION. WHY THE TWO MOVEMENTS ARE MUTUALLY DEPENDENT AND SHOULD KEEP COMPANY. At this important period of our national and political existence, twenty minutes are few in which to discuss so momentous a topic as "The Proper Attitude of the Prohibition Party Toward Woman Suffrage." Therefore, from the standpoint of justice and righteousness, as God gives me to see it, I present several propositions which I briefly support. I premise there are not many before me who deny the right of woman to franchise; few who would not say with George William Curtis, "Women have quite as much interest in good government as men, and I have never heard any satisfactory reason for excluding them from the ballot-box." There may, however, be some who have conscientious scruples concerning it; who really believe a loss of womanliness would be the sequence. What women are more advanced in this line of thought and effort than the leaders of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union? Is Frances E. Willard, whom you so honored as she stood before you last evening, unwomanly? and does not she lead the host? Do you say she has not been at the ballot-box? She pleads for the privilege! Are the polls worse than the saloons where she and other women have been? Have you seen less to admire and love in those women who once sat in their own homes "at the feet of Jesus and learned of Him," but who in the day of crusade blessing in 1874, realized for the first time the indwelling power of Christ, and entered the very gates of hell to carry the glad tidings of salvation to the dying? In that "the love of Christ constraining," I stand before you to represent the great body of women who ask not alone recognition by the Prohibition party on the basis of constitutional and moral right, but for the handclasp with the forgotten half of the home, which will be the fulfillment of God's order of duality and yet of unity-"the two in one," which will lift this government upon the shoulders of Him who is Wonderful, the Counsellor, that Christ may be crowned our Sovereign, and His law be our rule of governmental as of individual action. We ask the recognition of women as equal with yourselves in all the functions of government, that politics, now represented by the saloon, through ministers and brewers, Christian laymen and anarchists, who cast their ballots for the licensed perpetuation of the liquor traffic, "may be redeemed from the prince of this world and given into the hands of our Lord." In so doing we but express the oft-repeated belief of our enemy, that nothing will so successfully antagonize his interest, and build up the cause of righteousness as the ballot in the hands of women. Do you say, "Women are not equal to its exercise?" "A republic," says Guizot, “requires the highest degree of intelligence and virtue." No one denies that the virtue of the nation is largely with its women. Look into the state prisons-forty men to one woman! But more than two-thirds of the church membership are women, and if the law of the land was as that of my state of Massachusetts in its early years, only church members being allowed to vote, this would be a government of women. If the church is to be a power through which the purpose of God for the redemption of the world is to be accomplished, woman, who is so large a factor in that organization, should have every opportunity to impress her personality upon society and government. But not the virtue alone; the intelligence as well, in a ratio exceeding the increase of our population, is with women. Three times as many girls as boys graduate at our high schools, and so likewise the number of young women entering our higher institutions of learning is more and more. |